Attacks Show Easygoing Jamaica Is Dire Place for Gays

Sunday

Feb 24, 2008 at 4:52 AM

Being gay in Jamaica is not easy. For years, human rights groups have denounced the harassment, beating and even killing of gays in the country, to little avail.

MANDEVILLE, Jamaica — One night last month, Andre and some friends were finishing dinner when a mob showed up at the front gate. Yelling antigay slurs and waving machetes, sticks and knives, 15 to 20 men kicked in the front door of the home he and his friends had rented and set upon them.

“I thought I was dead,” Andre, 20, a student, recounted in a faint voice, still scared enough that he was in hiding and did not want his full name to be used.

The mob pummeled him senseless. His right hand, the one he used to shield himself from the blows, is now covered with bandages. His skull has deep cut marks and his ear was sliced in half, horizontally. Doctors managed to sew it back together and he can hear out of it again.

Being gay in Jamaica is not easy. For years, human rights groups have denounced the harassment, beating and even killing of gays here, to little avail. No official statistic has been compiled on the number of attacks. But a recent string of especially violent, high-profile assaults has brought fresh condemnation to an island otherwise known as an easygoing tourist haven.

“One time may be an isolated incident,” said Rebecca Schleifer, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied the issue and regularly gets calls from the island from gays under attack. “When they happen on a repeated basis across the country, it is an urgent problem that deserves attention at the highest levels.”

Disapproval of gays is an entrenched part of island life, rooted, Jamaicans say, in the country’s Christian tradition. The Bible condemns homosexuality, they say. But critics say islanders are selective in the verses they cite, and the rage at gay sex contrasts sharply with Jamaicans’ embrace of casual sex among heterosexuals, which is considered part of the Caribbean way.

While some other Caribbean tourist destinations have made a point of marketing to gay travelers, Jamaica has notably not joined the trend.

The double standard on the island is reflected in the antigay lyrics of Jamaican dance hall music, the headlines of more hyperventilating tabloids — “homo” is the term most often used — and the fact that homosexuality remains illegal here, with the specific crime called “buggery.”

No place has shown that hostility recently more than Mandeville, a prosperous and quiet town in the South Coast area that rarely makes big news.

A couple of weeks back, a local tabloid, The Jamaica Star, ran a screaming headline when a local police officer, disturbed by the attack on the dinner party guests, decided to disclose his sexual orientation to the paper. He said he had been harassed regularly by his colleagues because he is gay. He said the police did not take violence against gays seriously.

“Jamaica’s motto is ‘Out of Many, One People,’ and I say, ‘What about us?’ ” said the police officer, Michael Hayden.

Mr. Hayden, who has since taken leave from the force, is in hiding out of fear that his colleagues might kill him.

Not even funerals are safe for gays. A year ago, just down the road from the disrupted dinner party, a gay businessman’s funeral was interrupted by a mob that gathered outside the church. The mob, outraged that effeminate mourners wearing tight pants and shirts had dared to show up, threw bottles and rocks through the church’s windows, then barged inside and ordered that the service be stopped.

The pastor, who had not known the dead man was gay, pressed on, furious at the protesters for what he considered a defiling of his church. “The same religion they use to justify these attacks, I use to show what they do is wrong,” said the pastor, the Rev. Amos Campbell, of True Vine True Holiness Church.

No one was prosecuted in the episode.

The country’s public defender, Earl Witter, later condemned the violence at the funeral, but he also reinforced the common view that if only gays would be less flamboyant, there would be less violence against them. Speaking to the Mandeville Rotary Club last April, he urged Jamaica’s gays to avoid flaunting their sexual orientation. “Hold your corners,” he said in the local vernacular, because “it may provoke a violent breach of the peace.”

As it is, Jamaica’s gays socialize at underground nightclubs and worship at secret church services that move around the island. The leading gay rights organization, Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays, must lie low even as it pushes for societal change.

Gareth Henry, a former leader of the group, fled to Canada last month, saying he had grown tired of being threatened. “Here, I’m no longer living in fear,” he said in a telephone interview from Toronto. “I’m finally able to be myself, to be an out gay man.”

The commander of the Mandeville police station, Inspector Claude Smith, while making clear that his religious beliefs firmly oppose homosexuality, rejected the notion that the police condone violence against gays. Enforcement of the law against homosexuality, he said, should be up to the police, not angry mobs.

In an interview, he recalled protecting a gay man who was chased through the streets of Mandeville about 15 years ago for wearing lipstick and carrying a purse. He predicted that the climate would not change for gays any time soon.

“Based on the response of these mobs, people get very angry when they come across them,” he said. “I don’t think they can survive in the open.”

The issue, though, is certainly out in the open. Last November, The Gleaner, the largest daily newspaper here, published an article saying that some of the island’s schools were using a home economics textbook that suggested same-sex unions were a type of family. Andrew Holness, the new education minister, swiftly pulled the book from circulation.

“We are reviewing all our books to ensure that they adhere to the moral view of society,” he told reporters.

Last April, the local news media reported that gays had protested outside the offices of the Western Mirror, a Montego Bay newspaper, after it published an article that said gays were responsible for a shortage of women’s underwear in the city.

Then there was the recent attack in Mandeville, which is still under investigation, with no arrests. Next to Andre, huddled in a corner during the attack, was his boyfriend, 22, who goes by the nickname Junior. Deep machete slashes run up and down the arm he held in the air to protect himself. His head was also battered, though he escaped a more vicious beating by running through the mob waving a kitchen knife.

Two other men at the dinner got away, but the fate of one guest remains unknown. He had fled into the yard before the attackers broke in and has not been heard from since. The police found blood at the mouth of a deep hole nearby; they suspect he may have been attacked in the yard, then fallen to his death.

Since the attack, Andre said, he has been trying to undo his gayness, following a common view here that it is an acquired behavior that can be dropped if only one prays more and pays more attention to the opposite sex.

He fled Mandeville after the attack and found refuge at the home of a pastor, who now delivers at-home sermons to him on how he must change.

With the pastor standing over him, Andre said he would try to be attracted to women, if only so he would never be beaten again. But he mentions another option, as well: leaving Jamaica.

The pastor says he has a son who is gay and has been unable to turn him around. But he is intent on converting Andre.

“Instead of cutting him, people should be counseling him,” said the pastor, who declined to be identified out of fear that his family might be attacked for protecting a gay man. “He needs to get over this demonic thing.”

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